Cancer Kills Grim Author Jean Genet

thieves, whores and murderers from the depths of his own perverse experiences, died Tuesday.

Genet, 75, died of throat cancer at his modest Paris home.

Dubbed the ''Black Prince of Letters'' by Jean Cocteau and called a ''liar, thief, pervert, saint and martyr'' by Jean-Paul Sartre, Genet has been hailed as a great dramatic poet of literature and damned as the occupant of a private hell who set his demons loose on the literary world in rolling waves of horror.

In his autobiographical The Thief's Journal Genet wrote he was accused falsely of thievery as a boy and sent to reform school. There he vowed to reject a society that had so wronged him and to become what he was accused of being.

Between world wars he lived as a vagabond, selling his body throughout Europe, picking whatever pockets became available and begging in the streets when those two avocations failed him.

By 1947 he had written his first poems and novels but also was facing a life term in prison as an habitual criminal after his 10th theft conviction.

Andre Gide, Sartre, Cocteau and other French intellectuals prevailed on the government to pardon him, and he was permitted to continue the novels he had started in the early 1940s.

Genet, who said he wrote to get out and stay out of prison, said of himself that he had lived to ''decisively repudiate a world that had repudiated him.'' His associates agreed with actress Madeleine Ranaud, who remarked to an interviewer years ago, ''How he needed love.''